What the hell is up with that?

So I woke up this morning with the "I’m gonna die" feeling that one has when sick.  My head was stuffy and most of my night was spent tending  a runny snoz.  I tried to sleep in longer but for reasons unknown I couldn’t.  I returned Onolani’s phone call and noticed a missed call from Betty Crocker.  These two ended up taking care of me today.  Even though being sick sucks a big fat nasty I do kinda like the being taken care of part.  Kong came over later in the evening and made some chicken.  The boy’s good with poultry.  I was fed sporting a stuffy head and now I am off to bed.  Mahalo to the girls for being so good to me.  Hopefully with the amount of sinus drugs in my body I will be back in action tomorrow. 

So turkey day went off with a bang and ended in a whimper.  The north shore pulled it together and the results were not boring.  A special thanks to the Anahola Emu.  Betty Crocker and Kong went shopping a total of 100 times in two days, baked pies, made cookies, baked rice pudding, drove almost the entirety of the island, cooked one hell of a Kahlua turkey and still managed to show up and clean the morning after.  Onolani "crack cleaned" the house half a dozen times, rounded up the folks with no where to go and delegated jello shots almost as efficiently as the military arms personnel.  Trombone brought us a table and chairs, cooked a prime rib and did a dance not to mention welcomed us into his house in Lew of noise complaints from Team Asia.  The two K’s delivered some tasty yams and gave us quite a show during the photo shoot.  Bellbottoms makes a mean bean salad and the casserole was one of my fav’s.  We got some fun photo’s and K number one documented the entire night on one memory card.  She’s good like that.  I had a blast.  It was probably one of the best Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.  I didn’t get a cheap T-shirt out of it but I did get to blow the conch shell.  How many of you can say that?  Maybe I’ll get a cheap T-shirt that says "I got to blow the conch".

Before I left I became
reclusive. I didn’t know at the time
that the launch sequence had already begun. I was trying to sober up in so many ways. I started chilling out on the alcohol as well
as the encounters with people that I loved. I think it was the best thing I could have done for myself at the
time. It may never make sense to the
people that loved me but it was all I knew to do. I had to take a step back and look at my
life. The things I found scared the shit
out of me. I didn’t want to be the
person I was. I didn’t want to live that
person’s life. It wasn’t my life
anymore. So I did what anyone with a
used car would do. I sold it to the
highest bidder. Who wants my life? Come and get it. Piece by piece I got rid of it.

 The sequence of events that led me
to my current position in life had been painfully enlightening. I had to give up everything to get to where I
am. It was almost like Hansel and Gretel
leaving breadcrumbs along the way. The
few things I didn’t sell ended up on other people or next to a dumpster in Santa Cruz. I gave
away my motorcycle jacket to a guy in Tennessee
who fixed our car. We were in bumpkins Tennessee
stuck at a Super 8 longing for any state but the one we were in. The guy who helped fix the car was rebuilding
a motorcycle. Here I was with a leather
jacket and no motorcycle and he had the bike but no jacket. I gave him the jacket as a tip. The rest of it ended up at various dumpsters
in California or with people that
would use it. I had stripped myself of
the things that I felt were holding me back. Not only did I give up the tangible things that filled the voids in my
life I gave up some of the best things that ever happened to me.

 I wasn’t happy. I thought I was happy with certain
distractions like the “love of my life”, some of the greatest friends anyone
could ever ask for and a family that would do anything for me. It just wasn’t enough for me. The hunger is there in all of us. Mine was just about to kill me. I became depressed. I didn’t feel that my life was worth two
shits even though I had it all. I had
the woman. I had the friends. I had the family. What I didn’t have was what I had wanted all
my life and never gone after.     When I came to Hawaii I had dwindled down to one pair of pants, three T-shirts, a button up shirt, two
pairs of shorts, a swimsuit, some socks, a few pairs of underwear, a tent, a
telephone and a laptop. I had never had
so little in my life. It all fit on my
body in some precarious fashion. No car,
no home, and no destination was what I was living. It was the most freeing thing I had done
yet. All of the things I used to think
were important were all gone. No car,
just hitchhike. No home, just pitch a
tent on the beach and live there. No destination,
think of a new one. I was creating a new
life. I was on my way to Tibet
to save that tiger finally. The fact is
that no matter where you are or what you are doing a part of us always wants
something else. It’s just a matter of
how much.

In an attempt to work through my thoughts I am going to try and keep this going.  What is "this"?  It’s me sharing my thougts.  Since I don’t have a shrink and most of you don’t know certain things about me I figured what better way to concrete our friendships than to "share".  Actually I am just really bored and hope that this might help me break through a writers block.

When I say that I am not sure what
I am doing I really mean it. I have no
idea why I act, talk, or exist the way I do. In “Back to the Future” Michael J. Fox played a high school student
bored with the public education. His
only true friend was some nutty professor type.  Fox travels back in time determined to unite
his parents or risk erasure of his future thus himself by making out with his
mother. I’ve spent my life sitting,
walking, running, basically moving through thoughts trying to create my future
thus myself and never once thought of making out with my mom. My life is also not a film. I always wanted it to be though.

 When I was really young I wanted to
be like Indiana Jones or Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone”. It wasn’t their manhood I wanted to
embody. It was their lifestyles. I wanted to run around the world and play in
the dirt or fly a plane into a jungle only to wreck it and survive unscathed. My escape was through movies. I spent a lot of time watching these films
and never once thinking that they weren’t really in India but on location in Mexico. Where ever they were it was still better than
where I was. 

 I spent the “better” part of my life
in the same basic area. I went to school
with the same people year after year. I
would get excited when I heard: “Suzy
moved to Dallas this summer. Her dad got a new job”. Then I would think to myself “what does Dallas
look like”. I would imagine a place that
I couldn’t imagine. I wanted to go
further than Myrtle Beach or Charleston
when my family would take trips and was jealous to hear in august when school
started that the Wellington’s trip
consisted of seven different flights over three continents. I didn’t want to be a Wellington
I just wanted to travel like one.

 Then came high school and I wanted
to be the kid everyone was talking about. You know the one who graduated and did something grand with their
life. At first I figured it would be the
lawyer or the doctor but it never really made me happy when I thought about it. I wanted to do something even better. When I heard: “Hey, did you hear about
______? They moved to Thailand to help raise motherless Bengal Tigers!” I would feel something change inside of me. Instead of being happy for the person or even
the tiger I would loathe their existence. “I could do that.” I would think to myself. I waited way too long to go save that motherless
tiger.

 In college I realized I was free to
travel anywhere and do anything. This
was great except for one thing. I didn’t
know how to travel. It’s not like baking
a cake or learning the English language. What the hell was I supposed to do? I never traveled like a Wellington.  My grandfather was a salesman and traveled
quite extensively but most of the time he chose a car as his mode. I on the other hand, when traveling any
farther than the southeast, used my VCR. All I knew was that airports were where people ran through terminals to
catch the love of their life from taking that flight. Train stations were a place you risked life
and limb to hop a train for a kiss and buses always pulled away with your love
on the other side. . The truth of the matter was that Airports
were streamed with security and anyone caught running was easily deemed
a security threat and bus and train stations were always in a “bad” part of
town.

Money was another factor. I didn’t exactly spend my money on the best
things. Instead of saving for a trip I
would party it away or buy some form of electronics that would allow me to
escape immediately. I had my priorities
all screwed up. I was content with
learning about these places but had no true drive to get there. I was living through everyone else and
feeling jealous because of it. I wanted
to do something more than see the “Sphinx” at putt-putt. I wanted to go to Egypt and see the real deal.   I wanted to know if the itch
from an Amazon mosquito bite differed from that of one in Pisgah forest. Screw lions at the zoo. Where’s the fun if it you can’t watch it take
down a small herd of African Water Buffalo. I felt like Jimmy Stuart in "It’s a Wonderful Life".  This didn’t work for me as a child and it sure as hell didn’t work for
me as an adult. It wasn’t until I was
twenty two that I took my first big trip.

 I set out with who was then the
“love of my life”. The idea was to see
as much as we could in a little over a month. It was amazing. We lived out of
her truck and camped in some fashion almost every night. It was a life changing experience, one that
stuck with me and became a very important catalyst in the “chain reaction” that is my life. I realized on that trip that I
was happiest when moving. The idea of
being in a new place the following day or even a matter of hours excited
me. How much distance could we fit into
one day? I felt free. The only decision I had to make was where to
go next. In between the target stops
there was so much to see. Why not bypass
that and try this route. It was simply
intoxicating. I knew people that left
their town never looking back. I admired
something about this. I don’t know
exactly what it was that I admired. Was
it the fact that they ventured off or what they did after the adventure began? Whatever
it was it built to a point that I couldn’t ignore anymore.

Not really.  Both earthquakes only lasted a few seconds.  It was an interesting wake up call.  No Tsunami’s and no damage to be reported at this much later date.  To be honest with you all it’s probably certain that you know more about what happened than I do.  Anyway, just thought I would share that.

In the word used by Seinfeld and adorned by so many for it’s implications, "Newman" has become a part of our everyday lives.  Today I had the opportunity to use it and have the very man it implicates sitting downstairs at the restaurant.  Newman was in our restaurant eating like the average Joe that frequents our establishment.  Oddly he was thinner than the footage suggests him to be.  And that impeccable smile is really his smile.  In an attempt to not crowd him with stares or the typical gawking that celebrities are probably accustomed to I merely tried to ignore him.  The fact that his back was to me and I could not verify his identity without attempting to use the men’s room only made ignoring him easier.  Finally he paid his check and exited as if to say: "Yes, it’s me…Newman."  He politely smiled and told all of us boozing around the bar to have a nice afternoon to which we all replied: "Thank you, you too."  In all of us was the urge to just say it.  It surely was a topic of conversation that I am sure he overheard bits and pieces of.  Mostly the bits and pieces that included the singular phrase "Newman" in a sly and contemtual voice.  He had taken it well and with great pride walked out the front door with a smile on his face.  Was the smile from the fact that we had all kept a safe distance or that we had "quietly" acknowledged his success as the infamous man that made us laugh?  Either way he acknowledged us and that was truly human of him. 

I’ve had an interesting summer.  I’ve found myself in paradise for no apparent reason, left my home, and wandered about trying to figure it out.  The more I think about coming home for a visit the more I get scared and don’t know what I want.  I think about  the way things used to be back home and the way they are now.  Friends changing last names, marriages, and change that I chose not to include myself in I guess.  It’s time for me to make a choice.  Where do I go from here?
I think what I am saying is that I don’t want to go home because I already am.  At least for now I am.  I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.  However, for right now this place feels right.  A friend spoke with me the other day and basically told me I was fucking around and needed to get my shit together.  The next couple of days I spent a lot of time thinking about what she had said.  Since then I have been clear.  It’s like her words shocked me into reality again (Thank you). 

It’s happening before our very eyes.

Read me

Like everything else that changes so have the winds.  They have picked up and brought more rain.  Some of you are watching leaves begin to change. I  miss that season when I am not there to see it.  However, I am glad I have seen it happen many times.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things we take for granted.  How does one remind themself not to?  Someone once told me to never regret the things that I have done.  Isn’t that taking your actions for granted though?  What about that other person that told me to learn from my mistakes?  Were they wrong?  Doesn’t learning come with regret?  If I could change my life, would I?
I am envious of people that have an idea of what they want out of life.  I feel as though I am just beginning.  A late bloomer in the big picture of reality.  Will these winds bring my answers? 

I feel this canyon growing between me and society.  I am to the point where I don’t care anymore.  Am I going to be one of those people that everyone else wakes up and reads about.  She was this and she was that…mean while there is no one person that could really say they knew me?  I wonder about this.  Is it narcissistic and shallow of me…perhaps.  However, what do we really know about the people we hang out with.
I am over the assumptions.  I am over the self centered bullshit that comes along with life.  Isn’t it hard enough to wake up everyday without the stupidity that comes along with it all?  One thing, if any, that this trip has taught me is that the people that have guided me to this day have done right by me.  As for the rest of society…they can suck my ass. 
All I ask is that all of you people that need a good kick in the ass please pull your head out of it before the blow comes.  I am no different than you.  I love the same way, I have friends the same way, and I take a fucking shit the same way.  So, before you get some idea in your head about me why not ask me yourself.